Take down the flags, put away the champagne, etc. The text of the new Start treaty is out on the US state department website, and the small print confirms the warnings of its sternest critics. Dodgy new counting rules mean that the real reductions in deployed nuclear weapons could turn out to be far less than the 30% advertised. Indeed, they could add up to nothing at all.

The treaty sets a new ceiling for deployed strategic warheads at 1550 on each side. That is indeed down about 30% from the ceilings established in the Moscow Treaty in 2002. But Article III, paragraph 2 of the new Start reveals a catch, explaining how the warheads will be counted.

Each re-entry vehicle on top of each ICBM and each submarine-launched SLBM missile will count as one warhead, which makes sense. But Article III also says that: "One nuclear warhead shall be counted for each deployed heavy bomber." That is a backwards way of saying every heavy bomber counts as just one warhead, even though a US B-52 Stratofortress or Russian Tu-95 Bear, can carry multiple bombs and missiles - up to 20 in the case of the B-52.

Hans Kristensen, at the Federation of American Scientists, the doyen of independent bomb-counters, was among the first to spot the implications of this counting method. Kristensen points out:

The paradox is that with the "fake" bomber counting rule the United States and Russia could, if they chose to do so, deploy more strategic warheads under the New START Treaty by 2017 than would have been allowed by the Moscow Treaty by 2012.

Kristensen welcomes the verification regime, involving mutual inspections of each side's nuclear sites, but this is his trenchant verdict on the agreement as a whole:

Indeed, the new Start Treaty is not so much a nuclear reductions treaty as it is a verification and confidence building treaty. It is a ballistic missile focused treaty that essentially removes strategic bombers from arms control.

In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Pavel Podvig agrees with Kristensen that the real value of the treaty will be its verification and transparency measures.

What is important is that the treaty provides the public with a way to hold the U.S. and Russian governments accountable for the nuclear weapons they possess.

That may be true but the accounting gimmick will be widely seen as undermining the claims to moral leadership made yesterday by Obama and Medvedev in Prague, especially going in to next week's nuclear security summit and next month's review of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, where the focus of the non weapons states will be what they see as the double standards of the nuclear status quo.